The project is designed to investigate factors regulating a family's interaction with its social environment. The central hypothesis is that families develop shared views or constructs of every social organization or unit with which they interact; these include hospitals, schools, and places of employment. This shared view has a fundamental regulating influence over a variety of measurable interaction patterns developing between the family and the social environment. Using laboratory interaction methods, the project investigates four aspects of these shared views or constructs. First, it studies the relationship between shared constructs and family interaction patterns. Second, using perceptual tests measuring cognitive controls, it studies the relationships between individual cognitive styles of family members and family-level shared constructs. Third, using psycholinguistic techniques, it studies the family's use of subtle linguistic cues to develop and maintain a shared view of a novel social situation. Fourth, by comparing the family's performance in its home with that in the laboratory, it studies the effect of the social environment itself on a family's shared constructs.